SilverStone has come up with a nice idea to combine the excellent capacity and value of a traditional hard drive with the speed advantages of Solid State Drives. By combining a normal hard drive and a SSD into a single “virtual” drive, they promise a speed increase of up to 70%.
The basic idea is that you attach both your normal hard drive and an SSD, using the SSD as a cache for often-used data. I really like the idea and the product description:
This speed increase is very noticeable and significant for any PC users that have not experienced using SSD drives before. For those who are not ready to compromise on storage capacity and reliability for speed, HDDBOOST will enable SSD speed on its host hard drive and reduce the write times to SSD’s more fragile flash-based storage system, thus extending its effective lifetime.
Unfortunately the actual implementation falls short of my expectations. Reading on in their FAQ, the system does not actually contain any intelligence. You need to do a manual set-up, in which the first sectors of the hard drive are copied to the SSD. After that, reads for those sectors are served from the SSD, and other reads and all writes go to the hard disk.
I have my doubts about this first version of the product, but if they manage to create a next generation that actually manages to cache frequently used data on-the-fly it might become a big hit.
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